How India’s Public Libraries Evolved

baroda_central_library_madras_courier
Photograph of the library at Lakshmi Vilas Palace in Baroda, Gujarat from the Curzon Collection, taken by an unknown photographer during the 1890s. An immense structure, the palace was built for the Gaekwar Sayaji Rao III (ruled 1875-1939) and was reputedly the most expensive building erected by a private individual in the 19th century. Originally designed and begun in 1880 by Major Charles Mant (1840-81), it was completed in 1890 by Robert Fellowes Chisholm (1840-1915). Both architects were pioneers of the Indo-Saracenic style, an orientalist fusion of Eastern and Western forms. The interior was richly decorated with lavish ornamental detail in this style but was planned and furnished in a largely Western manner, as shown in this view of the library. The Gaekwar’s library consisted of c.20,000 volumes which he donated in 1910 to form the nucleus of the Baroda Central Library. This was established as part of the Baroda Library movement, a campaign to found free state libraries initiated by the Gaekwar. Image: Public domain.
India's public libraries were built by well-meaning men. These individuals have since been forgotten.

In the late 1800s, Maharajah Sayajirao III Gaekwad of Baroda, the grandfather of Maharani Gayatri Devi, introduced free and compulsory primary education supported by free public libraries. Dubbed “people’s universities,” these libraries were set up all around the princely state of Baroda paving the way for an organised system of acquisition, stock-keeping and classification of books.

In 1906, the Maharajah visited America and was so overawed by the libraries there that he invited William Alanson Borden, the founder of the Connecticut Library Association and an engineer-librarian credited with designing the removable-drawer catalogue card cabinet, to Baroda.

Under the aegis of Borden, the princely state received a state central library and four district or divisional libraries; forty-five town libraries and more than a hundred village libraries were planned. As part of the plan to establish one grand principal library, Borden persuaded J. Snead and Company, the architectural enterprise that designed the Library of Congress, Washington D.C, to design the Central Library of Baroda.



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